Today’s Question: I’ve noticed that some of my photos have a white color label in Lightroom Classic, rather than the actual colors I assign to mark photos for workflow tasks. What is a white color label if there’s no way to assign white as a color label?
Tim’s Quick Answer: When a photo appears in Lightroom Classic with a white color label rather than one of the available colors for labels, that is an indication that the value in metadata does not match the current definitions for the color labels.
More Detail: When you assign a color label to an image, you’re not actually assigning a color, but rather adding text to the Label field in metadata. Because of this issue, it is possible to have color labels assigned to images that don’t match the applicable definitions of color labels. In Lightroom Classic, an image with a color label assignment that doesn’t match the current definitions will appear with a white color label.
You can review or modify the color label assignments in Lightroom Classic by going to the menu while in the Library module and choosing Metadata > Color Label Set > Edit. It is worth noting that Lightroom Classic and Adobe Bridge use different definitions for the color labels, so for example if you had assigned color labels in Bridge prior to importing photos into Lightroom Classic, there would be a mismatch for those images if you hadn’t changed the definitions of color labels.
By default, Lightroom Classic adds the name of the color to the Label field when you assign a color label to an image, such as “Red” for a red color label. With Bridge the red color label results in the word “Select” being added to the Label field.
I recommend keeping the default color label definitions in Lightroom Classic since they are logical. You can then update the metadata for images with Label values that don’t match those definitions.
For example, you can navigate to the All Photographs collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module to browse all photos, and then choose the Metadata tab on the Library Filter bar. Set one of the columns to “Label”, and select one of the non-standard values from the list. For example, if you have “Select” as an option based on assigning a red color label in Bridge, you could select that from the list to view only those images.
Once you’ve set a filter for images that have a non-matching color label assignment, select all photos by choosing Edit > Select All from the menu, and then assign the correct color label. For example, in this case you could go to the menu and choose Photo > Set Color Label > Red.
Because the color label feature is really a method for displaying an image attribute based on the text added to metadata, in this case for the Label field, it is important to ensure you’re using a consistent workflow for updating the Label field based on the color label definitions in Lightroom Classic. Fortunately, if you have images with values in the Label field that don’t match the color label definitions, you can select those images and assign the correct color label to update the text in the Label field and therefore cause the appropriate label color to appear for the images.
